Now More Than Ever, Companies Must Build Better Leader-Coaches

The future of work needs leaders who can foster a growth mindset in their workforce

The fundamental value proposition of leadership and the expectations of followers are in a state of flux. Decades of leadership research is calling into question traditional models of leadership that involve hierarchy, “command and control” direction-setting, and accountability as singular focal areas. The data is clear: these methods alone are at best ineffective, and at worst even reduce the collective performance of organizations.

To address these changes, organizations must help leaders accelerate the growth of their people and invoke their best performance, rather than demanding it. This requires a shift in approach from simply setting expectations and managing individual performance, to guiding collective performance and managing individual learning.

Historically, the model for adult learning was weighted heavily on college and graduate education, that once completed, led to working experiences within a static (or at least stable) organizational system. In the new competitive landscape, this model of adult learning no longer fits given the frequent disruptions, changes in technology, and constant innovation. These require integrating continuous learning into working experiences so people can adapt to routine and broad changes impacting their working approach.

Failure to implement robust talent management practices and employee development programs has clear consequences. Organizations with a lack of developmental focus and decreased psychological safety miss learning and innovation opportunities, experience decreased engagement, battle retention challenges, and may even foster ineffective or toxic cultures. To address these challenges, organizations must first consider how to incorporate learning, cocreation, and adaptation into every aspect of organizational life. Building Leader coaches is a frontline intervention to aid learning, collaborating, and integration of new ways of performing.

Further, there is strong evidence that a top motivator of Generations Y and Z is receiving coaching and developmental experiences from their leaders and organizations. Consider these findings by Gallup:
 

These data points collectively paint a stark picture: the modern workforce clearly desires development, yet they are not receiving good coaching from their managers or proactively asking for feedback to accelerate their performance. This suggests leaders can create immediate value for their organizations by establishing robust developmental offerings and providing feedback on a regular basis to guide, support, and motivate.

Many leaders are tasked with both performance management and the development of talent, and thus are faced with a tricky conundrum. Research suggests that performance feedback alone (e.g., highlighting what was wrong or ineffective) decreases employee’s belief in their own capabilities (e.g., self-efficacy). This forces leaders to walk a tightrope: helping people understand how they need to adapt their performance, while also increasing their belief in their capacity to change. Only by helping leaders become great coaches can organizations effectively balance these dynamics so feedback is delivered in ways that cultivate insight, and motivational systems are supported to help employees internalize learning and change their behavior.

Equally as important as helping leaders become great coaches is helping people become more coachable. Helping workforces move from a fixed to flexible mindset has been transformative for many organizations.

Building coachability helps people develop skills to interpret feedback and shift their behavior in alignment with both performance expectations and their career goals. Research has demonstrated that highly coachable employees are more accepting of feedback and better able to internalize external perspectives to adapt their performance. Thus, leaders must become more consistent in their coaching behaviors to socialize its importance and position it as a fundamental aspect of performance culture.

To act on this, leaders should help their people actively seek feedback around specific developmental opportunities, internalize the feedback in digestible ways, and identify new avenues of application. Reflective tools and frameworks can be great resources to help people integrate feedback into their self-concept and identify supportive implications for making adjustments. 360̊ feedback as a tool for self-awareness can also pay dividends toward helping people understand the need for change – thus making them more coachable.

Leaders with this approach not only cultivate workforces that are more open to performance feedback, but also build in self-reflection as a fundamental professional skill. In this way, they help their colleagues develop metacognition (e.g., think about how we think) to evaluate how they're approaching challenges, not just the challenge itself. The outcome is often breakthrough thinking, “aha” moments, and novel solutions that yield surprisingly solid results.
 

So what skills make a leader a strong coach? The skills are fundamentally growth-oriented, place importance on the individual’s career interests that align with the strategic future of the business. Here are five key competencies leaders can learn and develop to become effective coaches to scale their peoples’ capabilities.  

Leaders who coach understand that they are there to help others achieve and grow, rather than do things themselves to earn recognition. Coaches offer counsel, guidance, and better questions, rather than solving problems for their employees. They offer personal stories and learnings to foster insight and help the employee think through how they would like to proceed, rather than dictating. They work together to differentiate great ideas from good ideas, and when necessary, partner to show the employee how a project or task could be accomplished. In this framework, the ownership of the task remains with the employee, and therefore they can learn the tactical decision-making and operational skills to achieve results autonomously. Additionally, a grounded sense of confidence in their skillset is reinforced as they exceed expectations and navigate emergent challenges.

The key to unlocking performance and maximizing potential is not just to challenge employees, but also to support them in recovering and reflecting on challenging work experiences in a way that enhances their perspective. Providing a safe space to reflect and incorporate lessons learned can reduce defensiveness, which ultimately encourages employees to take calculated risks and grow their capabilities.

Leaders who coach with empathy innately teach their employees to lead with empathy, which often has a powerful impact of helping them align their words and deeds. This enhances the impact of their team’s leadership and ultimately builds greater followership. Engaging with empathy allows leaders to gather more information about their people and develop unique strategies to help each person bring their whole self to work. Leaders can demonstrate this easily by asking more open-ended questions, listening, respecting contrarian perspectives, and aligning their behavior with their values.

We frequently meet results-oriented executives who hold their teams accountable for their performance, but less so for their learning. What they fail to fully understand is fostering learning and measuring progress will enhance a team’s future effectiveness– even if that means sometimes sacrificing performance in the short run. 

Leaders can create a high-performance culture this way by instituting “after action reviews” and debriefs to critique work processes and outcomes, and planning for a better approach in the future. This sort of activity becomes expected for employees; they get in the habit of self-reflecting, critiquing, and refining—in essence, they get in the habit of solidifying their learning before moving onto the next activity. When people do not perform, employees learn what the leader and organization will tolerate. Ultimately, enhancing learning accountability develops the employees’ performance mindset, self-regulation, and ability to effectively work in a coaching culture.

Leaders as coaches do not naively believe their solutions are the best simply because they are in charge. Giving novel ideas the space to flourish fosters an environment of experimentation, thought leadership, and strategic acumen. These leaders encourage the team to operate in their own style, to pursue what they think is best, and to look at problems in new and different ways. These leaders tackle both over-confidence and under-confidence in their workforce and use perceived or actual failures as an opportunity to identify knock-on implications of actions on a range of stakeholders or other business units. Further, when people are given responsibility for longer-term thinking, they often come up with surprisingly good solutions. These leadership behaviors build the team’s ability to understand the broader organizational system, operate strategically, and offer breakthrough thinking.

Savvy leaders understand that organizational and market dynamics are always shifting and change is inevitable. As new technologies continue to disrupt traditional and long-standing industries, and global crises create new barriers to organizational success, the need has never been greater to demonstrate agility in the face of change. Great teams deliver more than the sum of their individual performance, and this

Once leaders have built their coaching toolkit around these 5 key competencies, their value proposition dramatically shifts, and they ultimately become more compelling in eliciting followership. Employees are likely to want to work for them because they are better for it and the working experience becomes more meaningful. These leaders become talent magnets and talent launchers, who fill the pipeline of future leaders for the organization. Their team’s output gets noticed and they build a reputation for being able to facilitate high performance through others. Taking their coaching skillset to the next level helps executives take their game to a new level and become organizational stewards for the future.